How Pharaohs Projected Divine Power | Lost Treasures of Egypt

These iconic monuments are just shouting, screaming at us: power, dominance, control. I feel about this; I feel so insignificant. Together, these pyramids and the Sphinx and the temples create a landscape of [Music] power. The huge sculpture protects the necropolis, a giant symbol of supremacy, believed by many to have the face of Khufu, son of Khafre, owner of Giza's second largest pyramid.

Despite many visits here, Jon has never been up close. Today, he's been granted special access to explore its enclosure. "It's absolutely inspiring! I mean, it's just jaw-dropping. I've waited 50 years to be here, and now I'm here! It's just... wow!"

66 ft high, the Sphinx gazes east towards the rising sun. "I know what it's like to work with the living rock and how to carve it. This would have been a monumental challenge. They only had copper chisels, wooden mallets. It would have been in a harsh environment; this dust would have been everywhere. And yet, the workmen, the craftsmen, the masons, they were all willing participants, loyal to Pharaoh."

It would have taken thousands of people decades to construct the epic monuments of Giza, but there's no evidence the Pharaohs enslaved people to build them. "They didn't draw their power over the people from force," John believes. "What stood these kings apart was that they inspired devotion. The sheer volume of stone that has gone into building this, and each individual block represents the loyalty that they had for the Pharaoh."

The huge monuments of Giza represent the peak of the Pyramid Age. So why was nothing built on this scale again? At the height of Khufu's reign, reliable seasonal rains fed the crops that ensured Egypt's prosperity. For three months every year, the Nile flooded and inundated the farmland, so farmers couldn't work the fields. The farmers were free to help build the king's enormous tomb; they believed he kept the gods content and the country fed.

But soon after Khufu completed his pyramid, Egypt began to suffer. [Music] Drought and crop yields crashed, and so did the taxes coming into the state's treasuries. Despite the free labor, the Giza monuments almost bankrupted Egypt. The people's loyalty began to falter. The king's tombs that followed got smaller while Khufu's Great Pyramid remained dominating the Nile's West Bank. "The sheer power that he held is absolutely unbelievable. It was a power his struggling successors were desperate to replicate."

At Abu Gurab, Italian archaeologist Melano Noto wants to know how the kings of the Pyramid Age held on to power as their wealth and status declined. He has spent his entire career trying to understand a very different monumental structure, an enigma whose mysteries captured his imagination in his very first student course in Egyptology.

This enormous scatter of ancient rubble was once a sun temple dedicated to the most powerful god of the Pyramid Age. Each king wanted a pyramid for achieving his resurrection, but this was not enough for the Fifth Dynasty kings; they wanted something more. "The king built this place to turn himself into a god. The sun god. The Pharaoh Nuserre didn't just want to become divine in death; he built this temple because he wanted to be worshiped as a god while he was still alive."

Rising from the desert was an enormous obelisk, the centerpiece of the temple. It was not a traditional slender stone needle but shaped more like a pyramid. Monumental walls enclosed it, creating a courtyard in which people could come to worship the sun. The temple aligned perfectly on an east-west axis with the path of the sun, so on the summer solstice every year, the sun rose through the entrance, traveled directly over the obelisk, and set at the western end. This alignment is identical to that of the [Music] pyramids.

Records suggest that six of the Pharaohs who followed Khufu decided to build a sun temple as well as their pyramid to underline their divine status to the people of Egypt. But almost all of these temples are lost. "We know that there were six sun temples, and we actually so far have discovered only two." Max H's excavating this sun temple will shed light on these kings' power and perhaps help him crack one of the biggest mysteries in Egyptology and find the other missing sun temples.

The problem is, Max is not the first to decode this structure's secrets. Early Egyptologists excavated here more than a hundred years ago and left a mess of archaeological confusion in their wake. "Well, this find is amazing because it's a cover of matches left by the archaeologists during their work, along with their discarded matchboxes. Early 20th century excavators left 4,500-year-old pottery scattered across the site."

As you can see here, this area of the temple is full of potsherds, but unfortunately, this material is completely useless for us because it's out of a secure context. "We cannot tell us anything about the life of the temple. If Max can find undisturbed artifacts, they might reveal clues the first archaeologists missed. Even the smallest of finds could be crucial in the hunt for the lost sun temples of the Pyramid Age." [Music]